A useful, easy-to-follow guide to making the humble office anniversary party into a meaningful and memorable event.
Joi encourages managers to make workers feel appreciated and happy in this enthusiastic primer.
The author, an organizational psychologist, extols yearly celebrations of a worker’s hiring as a way to imbue an employee with a sense of purpose, belonging, and organizational support, which, he asserts, could help improve job performance by 56 percent and reduce sick days by 75 percent. Joi offers a systematic approach to making these celebratory events more impactful. He devotes much thought to the logistics of remembering anniversaries by way of start-date databases and automated notification programs that remind everyone from HR to the CEO’s secretary of a worker’s upcoming anniversary. He includes an extensive section on anniversary gifts (company-logoed apparel is good; lottery tickets are bad, because the recipient will feel disappointed and resentful when they don’t pay off; don’t give one employee a Rolex unless you give everyone a Rolex). The author details useful anniversary party roles and tips for everyone in the company, from graphic designers (make sure you spell the name right on the congratulatory certificate) to the IT department (ask employees if they need a new monitor, chair, or other equipment, then deliver it on the anniversary). Joi goes on to explore the work anniversary as a tool for the company’s social and cultural development. He recommends that managers prepare statements of praise and thanks for employees’ anniversaries, and that executives use the occasion for “skip-level” conversations with lower-level workers to listen to their gripes and mentor them on their careers; on the wilder side, he suggests staging over-the-top anniversary bonding rituals, like having a manager get on his knees to offer the employee a favorite snack. As an added bonus, Joi notes, the marketing department can use anniversary photos of happy, energetic employees to showcase the staff to prospective clients.
The book is in part a nuts-and-bolts how-to for staging work anniversaries, one that’s brimming with tips on everything from the tax implications of gift-giving to the syncing up of anniversaries with raises and performance reviews, all organized in helpful checklists and timelines and conveyed in lucid, straightforward prose that spells everything out. (“before anyone starts to eat, call out, ‘Two, four, six, eight! Whose sevenyears with XYZCorpdo we appreciate?’ and have everyone respond with the person’s name. Then say, ‘Let’s eat!’”). Joi also advances a humanistic management theory that views the employees’ psychic engagement as the key to a productive workplace and draws canny psychological insights from it: “Thinking bigger, work anniversaries have more power for an organization than birthdays because they’re uniquely about the relationship between the organization and the employee. They’re celebrating the moment the relationship began.” The prescription of cut-and-dried corporate protocols to foster deep, unfeigned social connectedness can sometimes feel a bit discordant: “On each employee’s work anniversary, authentically express—with details—how the employee is a uniquely valued member of the team. Say it. Write it. Smile it genuinely. Hug them, pat them on the back, or shake their hand (as appropriate).” Still, readers will find here a wealth of practical advice for making anniversaries more gratifying.
A useful, easy-to-follow guide to making the humble office anniversary party into a meaningful and memorable event.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9798988345435
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Quintriple Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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